“Sacrifice” that’s the word I was looking for, thank you.
I would like to add, in a healthy relationship you should be willing to make sacrifices (whether it’s monogamy, spaghetti noodles, or your left kidney) but that if it’s well-balanced and you share evenly, you should never feel deprived as if you have surrendured and lost something. You should not feel as if “relationship = forfeit”. The relationship should enhance not detract.
Clearly, in a monogamous relationship, I’ve “given up” sleeping with other women, but I’m so into my fiancee that I sure as hell don’t miss it, I don’t mourn it, and I don’t feel that I’ve lost out in this deal. That’s where the semantic part comes in, I guess. I may have “sacrificed” casual sex, but I feel no sense of loss. But if our sex life wasn’t healthy (boing!), I would probably feel like I had lost something and that would indicate something isn’t quite right with my relationship.
Do you realize how whiny this sounds? I don’t think anyone is telling you what you can or can’t do; what we’re trying to impress upon you is the fact that actions have consequences. Do what you want, but don’t try to fool yourself or us with the idea that what you’re doing is consequence-free. As you’ve seen from this thread, there is a spectrum of ways to approach long-term relationships; you need to find what works for both you and your wife, and if she doesn’t get a say in it, that simply isn’t fair.
You need to look into what is involved in emotional affairs. I think if you aren’t having them already, you will be soon.
Look, you’re speaking from a position of ignorance. It’s best, when speaking from a position of ignorance, to consider the possibility that you might not have a handle on all the answers.